


Into The Ghostbloods

by FeatherWriter



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Evil Shallan, Gen, Ghostbloods, Present Tense, Protagonist to Antagonist, Start Of Darkness, Words of Radiance spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:03:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1727111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeatherWriter/pseuds/FeatherWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A writing challenge presented by 17th Shard, turning protagonists into antagonists. This is a take on Shallan becoming an antagonist, post-Words of Radiance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into The Ghostbloods

Shallan is an accomplished liar, involved in the underground, and she's broken in ways that even she has difficulty admitting. She tells herself that she's doing what she has to in order to survive, in order to protect her family, in order to save the world. She shows herself willing to sacrifice those ideas of right and wrong when she steals from Jasnah, putting her needs above her morality.

As Pattern keeps showing her more and more scenes from her past, forcing her to remember, to relive, she has a harder and harder time pretending she isn't a monster. She blames him -- irrationally, she knows -- but blames him nonetheless. If it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t be a Radiant. Her mother wouldn’t be dead at her hand. None of this would have happened. Pattern does as he must, showing her the truths, making her confront them but it drives her further and further away from him. She keeps up the illusion of the girl with the lighthearted wit, but it is an illusion nonetheless. Inside, the truths of her past are making her colder and colder. 

Pattern accepts this as a matter of course. He was told time and time again of the cruelty of humans. As Shallan begins treating him less like a person and more like a tool, he accepts his role with a suffering endurance. This is the price he knew he would have to pay in order to come to the physical realm. Things seemed nice for a while, but those days are long gone. Shallan speaks to him when she needs a sword or a lock picked or a code broken, and he obeys quietly, waiting for the day when she will inevitably kill him and find the revenge she seeks.

The only other person who sees this hardening in Shallan is Mraize, who not only recognizes it, but encourages it. He marvels at the talent of his little knife, as she accepts that which she was always meant to be. He knows that he is winning her over as Veil becomes the reality and the girl known as Shallan becomes a mask for her to wear, a part for her to play.

She joined as a way to betray the Ghostbloods, but their reasoning has wormed its way into her, and Mraize’s honeyed explanations and persuasions – so at odds with this broken face – are making her compromise, bit by bit, until she is well and truly theirs. It isn’t to protect her brothers anymore, it isn’t because she wants to find out about them anymore. She continues following their orders because she know longer knows what she is without them.

The first time Mraize asks her to kill, she can’t even feel shocked. Only a hollow reminder that it will not be her first time. Nor even her second or her third. The images of her mother, of the lover, of Tyn rise to the surface of her mind. That which was once so carefully locked away Pattern has pried open and let free. There is no blood with a Shardblade. Pattern stays perfectly clean, as though he has no part in the things she does, as though her sins cannot stain him.

She resents him for that as well.

When the time comes to go through with the act however, the memory which fills her mind is not that of her mother or of Tyn, but of the man who never raised a hand to her, who took the blame for her first murder. She always thought Balat was the one who would emulate their father, but Shallan finds him within herself, even as she thinks back to kneeling on the ground beside him, a soft song on her lips, and a sparkling silver chain slowly twisted tighter and tighter after the poison could not end it.

After something like that, what more could Mraize’s orders do to stain her soul? She feels only the slightest bit of remorse when she hears the name, a bare nod to the fondness she once felt. Tyn could not finish her mission, but Veil has proved herself more competent than Tyn ever was.

Jasnah Kholin must not be allowed to continue. The Elsecaller interferes with their work.


End file.
